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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Last week, a number of TEDMED attendees and myself participated in a Google+ Hangout sponsored by Xerox to take a look back at our unique experiences at TEDMED 2013. The discussion included the following people:

We made it a really focused 15 minute discussion of the key takeaways from TEDMED. Some of the topics we discussed included: healthcare big data, multidisciplinary collaboration, citizen science, patient centered care, and a look at TEDMED topics 5-10 years from now. It was a really great discussion, and I encourage you to watch the TEDMED recap video embedded below.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

“You have to take what people think is wrong or even foolish and make the breakthroughs of tomorrow.” – John Kheir, MD

I’m still in awe of the ideas that John Kheir, MD presented at TEDMED around injectable oxygen-filled microbubbles. The concept is fascinating and while I know nothing about the science or medical requirements of what he was doing, I was even more impressed with the challenges that John Kheir faced from “the establishment” when he through out what many considered to be foolish ideas.

This is what make’s Dr. Kheir’s quote above so powerful. The breakthroughs of tomorrow really are often consider foolish ideas today. We see these examples in the tech world all the time. When Google began it was foolish to think that they could index the web and let people search through it. The dominant thinking of the time was that a website like Yahoo would curate the vast amount of web content for the users. Google’s foolish idea has turned out pretty well. It makes me wonder what foolish healthcare IT ideas are out there that we should be embracing and supporting as opposed to suppressing.

When Dr. Kheir had his breakthrough idea of oxygenating the blood through an IV, he started to research whether some sort of micro container existed. He discovered that indeed microbubbles already existed and were used for ultrasound imaging. He reached out to one of the leading experts on microbubbles and asked if they’d been used to oxygenate blood and if not why not. The researchers response was fascinating. He replied, “I didn’t know it would be useful.”

I ask then, are there technologies out there today that we just aren’t using in EMR and healthcare IT because “we didn’t know it would be useful?”

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

One of the beauties of TEDMED is that they do a really professional job recording the event and sharing the recorded video with the world. For those who missed it or want to re-watch certain sessions, you can find the full TEDMED session recordings available online. Thanks to Xerox, I was able to cover the event in person. If you’re looking for a cliff notes version of TEDMED, check out my previous posts covering the event:

As I think back on TEDMED, I’m stuck wondering about a major healthcare group I would have loved to see on the TEDMED stage: hospital and healthcare administrators. No doubt they’re doing some really innovative things in healthcare, but yet we didn’t see any of them on stage talking about how to innovate the nuts and bolts of healthcare.

It’s not that many of these hospital and healthcare administrators weren’t at TEDMED, because they were there in force. I met with many of them and saw many of them tweeting about TEDMED like this tweet from New York Presbyterian CIO, Aurelia Boyer:

Back at ranch #TEDMED may be having more effect on how I see things than I thought it would.

I hope that many more hospital and healthcare administrators will “Step Out” and speak at TEDMED like Hospital CIO Bill Reiger did at The Breakaway Group’s Healthcare Forum at TEDMED. It’s great that hospital and healthcare administrators are listening and learning at TEDMED, but they also have a voice that needs to be heard.

Looking forward to the next year in healthcare let me suggest three topics I hope we’ll find at TEDMED 2014:

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) – ACOs represent the core of a rapidly changing healthcare reimbursement environment. This change will fundamentally alter healthcare as we know it. ACOs are a hard topic to package into a slick presentation, but there are stories to be told about the impact for good and bad of ACOs. We often hear: “If you’ve seen one ACO, you’ve seen…one ACO.” How about we start with one ACO TEDMED talk and expand from there?

Interoperability – Almost nothing could provide more value to healthcare than true data interoperability. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of people affected every day by the lack of healthcare interoperability. The challenges to interoperability are real and powerful, but I see a shifting tide where organizations are finally looking to embrace interoperability and its inherent benefits. TEDMED would be the perfect place to highlight the interoperability success stories that will inspire others to follow.

Patient Engagement – A number of sessions at TEDMED 2013 began the discussion of the shifting role of patients in healthcare. I won’t be surprised if 2014 becomes the Year of the Patient. Like a slow moving ship that’s impossible to stop, the patient is finally becoming the center of healthcare. ZDoggMD’s comment at TEDMED highlights this shift from the physician perspective, “I went in to medicine to do things for patients, not to patients.” Patients at the center of healthcare is a message that needs to be shared.

In true TEDMED form, it only seems appropriate that I also suggest a collaborative musical act that could perform at a future TEDMED. If you’ve never heard of The Piano Guys, they’re great. Where else have you seen a piano and cello collaboration perform Coldplay, Usher, and Adele? Although, their real genius is when they take two songs and mix them into one beautiful piece like they did with Love Story Meets Viva La Vida. I can think of a few areas of healthcare that could benefit from some unexpected collaboration.

What did you take away from TEDMED 2013? Have you had a change in perspective personally or professionally? What topics should we see at future TEDMED events?

You can hear more reflections from TEDMED and predictions for the future of healthcare during the May 2 at 2 p.m. ET “Xerox ‘Ask the Experts’ Episode: Looking Ahead After TEDMED” Google+ Hangout that I’m hosting and participating in. Click here for more details and to watch.

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Many are concerned with the user experience in Health IT – particularly regarding the user-friendliness of EMRs. While it is easy to be overwhelmed by the negative reports, there are businesses and providers working hard to resolve these issues. McKesson is one of those companies, and they were recently recognized for their work at HIMSS13. Will more companies start making efforts like this?

One step toward making EMRs more user-friendly is, well, making them accessible to patients. Unfortunately, according to a recent Accenture study, 65 percent of doctors believe patients should only have limited access to their health records, and 4 percent believe records should be totally closed. Reasons range from self-consciousness of what a doctor says in a record, to being uncomfortable with using digital records. Allowing patient-access may very well be a huge cultural shift for doctors everywhere.

In order to pass Meaningful Use stage 1, one must indicate which EMR was adopted. But, according to BuildYourEMR.com’s CEO, Mike Jensen, 74 percent of the providers who stated they were using his EMR…weren’t. If this is similar across the board, around 5.4 billion dollars were paid in error for incentives. While this isn’t likely to be the case, it’s pretty sad the lengths people will go to in order to get some extra money. EMR vendors need to start going over their CMS data in order to help prevent this fraudulent behavior.

If money was at stake for you to lose weight, would that motivate you? For most people, it probably would. DietBet takes the desire people have to lose weight and pairs it with the innate desire to have money, and creates a weight-loss game. If you lose 4 percent of your body weight in four weeks, you get part of the money pot for the group you are in. If you don’t, you lose the amount you paid to participate in the first place.

John recently had the opportunity to go to TEDMED as a guest of the Breakaway Group (A Xerox company). It was a great experience for him, and highlights can be found @ehrandhit or searching #simplehealth on Twitter. John recounts some of key takeaways from TEDMED, and suggests some of the major themes that will likely be seen in healthcare.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Despite my vow to travel less after the back to back HIMSS-SXSW journey, next week I’ll be spending a week in DC at the famous TEDMED conference. I was invited to attend TEDMED as a guest of Xerox and I honestly couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be part of what I hear is a really valuable and special experience.

Many might wonder why Xerox is so involved in TEDMED. Despite Xerox’s amazing branding as a copier company, Xerox has a very large presence in healthcare. Take a look at a few of these Xerox numbers:

900+ Million healthcare claims processed per year

22+ Thousand employees dedicated to healthcare

1700+ Hospitals Served

36 Million people served by government health services

100 percent of the top ten BCBS organizations are clients

2/3 of U.S. insured patients are touched by Xerox services

With that type of healthcare portfolio, my only surprise is that we haven’t talked about Xerox in healthcare a lot more. As I’ve learned more about Xerox’s work in healthcare, I absolutely love their approach of trying to simplify healthcare. I’m hopeful to see many talks around this at TEDMED since far too many things in healthcare have been made to complicated.

It will be nice to attend TEDMED where I have zero meetings set up and plan to just experience the event as it was intended. A quick look at the TEDMED schedule and speakers shows an amazing variety of speakers across the spectrum of healthcare. Trying to pick out one speaker or session that excites me most would be like trying to name a favorite movie or book. I expect that the most powerful thing won’t be an individual talk, but the experience as a whole.

If you’re planning to attend TEDMED, I always love to meet readers of my site. So, come up and say Hi. For those following back at home, I’ll be live tweeting from the event using the #SimpleHealth hashtag and will no doubt be doing a number of blog posts about the experience and things I learn.

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